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arXiv · 1010.4915

The clustering of massive galaxies at z~0.5 from the first semester of BOSS data

Abstract

We calculate the real- and redshift-space clustering of massive galaxies at z~0.5 using the first semester of data by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). We study the correlation functions of a sample of 44,000 massive galaxies in the redshift range 0.4<z<0.7. We present a halo-occupation distribution modeling of the clustering results and discuss the implications for the manner in which massive galaxies at z~0.5 occupy dark matter halos. The majority of our galaxies are central galaxies living in halos of mass 10^{13}Msun/h, but 10% are satellites living in halos 10 times more massive. These results are broadly in agreement with earlier investigations of massive galaxies at z~0.5. The inferred large-scale bias (b~2) and relatively high number density (nbar=3e-4 h^3 Mpc^{-3}) imply that BOSS galaxies are excellent tracers of large-scale structure, suggesting BOSS will enable a wide range of investigations on the distance scale, the growth of large-scale structure, massive galaxy evolution and other topics.

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BibTeXRIS

Martin White, M. Blanton, A. Bolton, D. Schlegel, J. Tinker, A. Berlind, L. da Costa, E. Kazin, Y. -T. Lin, M. Maia, C. McBride, N. Padmanabhan, J. Parejko, W. Percival, F. Prada, B. Ramos, E. Sheldon, F. de Simoni, R. Skibba, D. Thomas, D. Wake, I. Zehavi, Z. Zheng, R. Nichol, D. Schneider, Michael A. Strauss, B. A. Weaver, David H. Weinberg. 2010-10-23. The clustering of massive galaxies at z~0.5 from the first semester of BOSS data. https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-637x/728/2/126

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